XML News from Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has posted the proposed recommendation of VoiceXML 2.1. VoiceXML is used to describe those annoying call trees you hear when calling most major companies. (Press 1 if you want to wait on hold for 20 minutes and then be hung up on; press 2 if you want to wait indefinitely; press 3 if you'd rather we just hung up on you now.) New features in 2.1 include data and foreach elements, dynamic grammars and scripts, detecting barge-in during prompt playback, fetching xml without requiring a dialog transition, recording user utterances while attempting recognition, and specifying the media format of utterance recordings.